Jessica Steiner (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jessicasteiner) wrote2011-02-21 07:47 pm
jessicasteiner) wrote2011-02-21 07:47 pm
Entry tags:
Editing: ...Fun...?
Wow, that was an intense weekend.
I had really focused on getting law school homework done on Friday and Saturday, specifically to clear off Sunday for some relaxed fun. Between my workload, my financial, er, situation (that's the nicest way I can think of to refer to it at this point) and several major crises last week at work (involving baseball bats being waved at one client and children of another client possibly being kidnapped to the Congo by his ex) I was pretty much in freakout mode and I needed a nice vacation.
I figured on Sunday I'd kick back, watch a movie or two, maybe get online and do some roleplaying with friends.
Instead, I spent over 7 hours working on The Sleeping Death.
So I thought I'd babble about this book for a bit, and about what I'm doing with it, since it's been a few days since my last post and I haven't really talked about my own writing yet.
*ahem*
So The Sleeping Death is a fantasy novel, set in a world where all of the natural forces (heat, light, motive energy, death, entropy, anything you can imagine, basically) are powered by magical spirits known as vox. If you want to heat something up, all the heat-vox (covox) will go cling to that object and more and more will gather until it is at the right temperature. In most cases, no one can actually see this happening, but mages in this world are able to capture the spirits in glass bottles and force them to obey commands instead of acting naturally, so that they can have all kinds of nice things like cars, coffee makers and cellphones.
Three hundred years ago, the mages of a tiny country called Laxam trapped Death in a bottle. Congratulations, world, you have instant immortality, worldwide. The same country also trapped War, and put him to work on their side. Yes, there's a Famine, too, and the fourth Horseman is Order (not Pestilence), the white Horseman according to some versions of the legend. He's the mastermind. They don't actually ride horses in this book, though.
Anyway! At the beginning of the book, Death manages to escape her prison. And she's...not happy. She's also rather confused, and she latches onto a jaded journalist named Liilan Uwis, who can't resist a pretty face, and who agrees to help her out before finding out that she's the personification of Death itself.
It's pretty wild.
I completed the first draft of my novel some time ago, and I had been letting it sit while I finished another novel, called Otherwhere, which I will talk about in a later blog entry. Then Holly Lisle, professional author and maintainer of the Forward Motion writing board, put out a new writing course called How to Revise Your Novel.
(I will no doubt talk about Forward Motion in more detail in future blog posts, and if you're an aspiring writer and you don't know Forward Motion, click that link or hang up your pen)
I'd never properly revised a novel before and I knew I didn't really know how to do it properly. Oh sure, I could take a stab at it, try to figure out if my characters were all necessary and if there was conflict in every scene, and I could do line edits like a boss. But I didn't really know how to do it in a systematic, efficient way.
I'd written one novel (Keystone), completely rewritten it from scratch, and found it just as broken as when I started and abandoned it in despair. I really didn't want to do that with Sleeping Death, and I really felt that it was solid. I got all the way to the end, and I still liked it! I had started trying to revise it in the only haphazard way I knew, but I like learning techniques and following instructions from people who know better than I do (before I figure out a better way, incorporating their ideas with ones of my own, that is).
So I signed up. Law school made it hard to really devote a lot of time to this project, but I poked away at it as best I could. I spent four months on the Week 7: Triage Your World step, and had to upgrade my worksheet binder to a larger size. I thought it was going to kill me.
But on Saturday I finally finished that painful, painful step. And then it was like the floodgates opened. I did weeks 8, 9, and 10 yesterday in a rather intense 7 hour stint with only short breaks for like, eating, and stuff like that. (I know, I know, write first, eat later, but dude, I was hungry).
And you know what? I'm really jazzed about editing, and I haven't actually changed a word of my manuscript yet. But I'm starting to see the overall picture of what needs to be done, and realize that I can actually make it better. I know that editing is the part that many writers really hate, especially writers who, like me, haven't sold a book yet. But there's something so incredibly freeing about taking a framework that you've already written, and just fixing the problems it has, rather than trying to get it right the first time as you create raw material.
It's like writing the draft is mining for gold. You dig down into the earth, and sweat and strain and cut through stone and pull up a nugget of gold, but it's kinda wobbly and dirty and not that shiny. But then you start editing, and you wash it off and melt it down and shape it and finally you have something beautiful and precious. I like this!
Right now I've pretty much finished identifying all of the major problems with the book. Over the next several weeks of the course I'm supposed to figure out how to fix those problems, and then I start cutting. I don't know how far I'll get as I work on papers and such - I have an outline and bibliography due next week and I haven't started researching yet. But I'll keep you posted.
I had really focused on getting law school homework done on Friday and Saturday, specifically to clear off Sunday for some relaxed fun. Between my workload, my financial, er, situation (that's the nicest way I can think of to refer to it at this point) and several major crises last week at work (involving baseball bats being waved at one client and children of another client possibly being kidnapped to the Congo by his ex) I was pretty much in freakout mode and I needed a nice vacation.
I figured on Sunday I'd kick back, watch a movie or two, maybe get online and do some roleplaying with friends.
Instead, I spent over 7 hours working on The Sleeping Death.
So I thought I'd babble about this book for a bit, and about what I'm doing with it, since it's been a few days since my last post and I haven't really talked about my own writing yet.
*ahem*
So The Sleeping Death is a fantasy novel, set in a world where all of the natural forces (heat, light, motive energy, death, entropy, anything you can imagine, basically) are powered by magical spirits known as vox. If you want to heat something up, all the heat-vox (covox) will go cling to that object and more and more will gather until it is at the right temperature. In most cases, no one can actually see this happening, but mages in this world are able to capture the spirits in glass bottles and force them to obey commands instead of acting naturally, so that they can have all kinds of nice things like cars, coffee makers and cellphones.
Three hundred years ago, the mages of a tiny country called Laxam trapped Death in a bottle. Congratulations, world, you have instant immortality, worldwide. The same country also trapped War, and put him to work on their side. Yes, there's a Famine, too, and the fourth Horseman is Order (not Pestilence), the white Horseman according to some versions of the legend. He's the mastermind. They don't actually ride horses in this book, though.
Anyway! At the beginning of the book, Death manages to escape her prison. And she's...not happy. She's also rather confused, and she latches onto a jaded journalist named Liilan Uwis, who can't resist a pretty face, and who agrees to help her out before finding out that she's the personification of Death itself.
It's pretty wild.
I completed the first draft of my novel some time ago, and I had been letting it sit while I finished another novel, called Otherwhere, which I will talk about in a later blog entry. Then Holly Lisle, professional author and maintainer of the Forward Motion writing board, put out a new writing course called How to Revise Your Novel.
(I will no doubt talk about Forward Motion in more detail in future blog posts, and if you're an aspiring writer and you don't know Forward Motion, click that link or hang up your pen)
I'd never properly revised a novel before and I knew I didn't really know how to do it properly. Oh sure, I could take a stab at it, try to figure out if my characters were all necessary and if there was conflict in every scene, and I could do line edits like a boss. But I didn't really know how to do it in a systematic, efficient way.
I'd written one novel (Keystone), completely rewritten it from scratch, and found it just as broken as when I started and abandoned it in despair. I really didn't want to do that with Sleeping Death, and I really felt that it was solid. I got all the way to the end, and I still liked it! I had started trying to revise it in the only haphazard way I knew, but I like learning techniques and following instructions from people who know better than I do (before I figure out a better way, incorporating their ideas with ones of my own, that is).
So I signed up. Law school made it hard to really devote a lot of time to this project, but I poked away at it as best I could. I spent four months on the Week 7: Triage Your World step, and had to upgrade my worksheet binder to a larger size. I thought it was going to kill me.
But on Saturday I finally finished that painful, painful step. And then it was like the floodgates opened. I did weeks 8, 9, and 10 yesterday in a rather intense 7 hour stint with only short breaks for like, eating, and stuff like that. (I know, I know, write first, eat later, but dude, I was hungry).
And you know what? I'm really jazzed about editing, and I haven't actually changed a word of my manuscript yet. But I'm starting to see the overall picture of what needs to be done, and realize that I can actually make it better. I know that editing is the part that many writers really hate, especially writers who, like me, haven't sold a book yet. But there's something so incredibly freeing about taking a framework that you've already written, and just fixing the problems it has, rather than trying to get it right the first time as you create raw material.
It's like writing the draft is mining for gold. You dig down into the earth, and sweat and strain and cut through stone and pull up a nugget of gold, but it's kinda wobbly and dirty and not that shiny. But then you start editing, and you wash it off and melt it down and shape it and finally you have something beautiful and precious. I like this!
Right now I've pretty much finished identifying all of the major problems with the book. Over the next several weeks of the course I'm supposed to figure out how to fix those problems, and then I start cutting. I don't know how far I'll get as I work on papers and such - I have an outline and bibliography due next week and I haven't started researching yet. But I'll keep you posted.